A RAGE FOR ART

Cynthia Robins is an Examiner staff writer and Beauty Editor of the San Francisco Examiner Magazine.

Published 4:00 am, Sunday, September 17, 1995

"I don't think when I work. I feel. I work by what I have to do." - Niki de Saint Phalle in "Who Is the Monster - You or Me?"

Documentary filmmaker Peter Schamoni sat in the back of a nearly empty movie theater in La Jolla with his friend David Hess, a Mill Valley actor-writer and the associate producer of the film they were about to see: Niki de Saint Phalle: Who is the Monster - You or Me? In the center of the darkened house was a lone figure. The subject of the 100-minute film. Niki de Saint Phalle.

"Here were two boys shaking in fear to face her," says David Hess, 58, who looks, with his tightly curling hair and beat-up, handsome face, like an aging gladiator. Hess, who, with composer John Corigliano, wrote "The Naked Carmen," and penned "All Shook Up" for Elvis Presley, handled most of Schamoni's stateside production problems and oversaw arrangements for filming in Italy. He says he also tried to run interference between Schamoni and de Saint Phalle when the going got creatively bumpy.

"We were 99 percent sure she would turn it down," he admits. "She insisted on sitting alone in the theater. When the lights came up, there were tears running down her face."

"Of course there were painful moments with Peter when we fought and disagreed," says de Saint Phalle, on the telephone from her studio in Paris. "But is there any birth without pain? I insisted on being really present in the film, not a 'star.' I wanted to bring to it the experiences, contradictions, rage, joy, humor and paradoxes that I express in my work."

"Niki is a great fighter," says Schamoni affectionately. "She really goes after her concept. I had that experience with the film as well. She is so successful following her instincts."

The extent to which Schamoni accomplished what both de Saint Phalle and he wanted is a testimony to the material and Schamoni's directing skill. In 1972, his film on Austrian artist Friedrich Hundertwasser was nominated for an Academy Award. His recently completed film on surrealist artist Max Ernst convinced de Saint Phalle to work with him. And now, the new film will be introduced to the U.S. the first Saturday night of the Mill Valley Film Festival. Obviously, de Saint Phalle was pleased. Enough to create the poster for this year's festival.

But ... there was at least one point during the three years it took Schamoni to research, film and assemble his homage to de Saint Phalle when she saw some rough footage and almost canceled the project. There was a glitch in communication between de Saint Phalle, who had fought her entire creative life for her independence of spirit and vision, and Schamoni, who saw his film not only as a record of de Saint Phalle's life and art, but of the love story between herself and Tinguely, two synergistic spirits with diametrically opposite styles.

"The film is such a love story," says the 60-year-old Schamoni, his English labored with a heavy Teutonic accent. "I told her that my main interest is to show the cooperation between her and Jean Tinguely. I knew them personally ... but I think in the history of art in our century, this collaboration is unique. Maybe Max Ernst and Dorothy Tanning had it. But it is rare. And this is something which is very important and this makes a movie. This is moving. This is emotional. And in her writing, I found this sentence: 'Dear Jean: Who is the monster - you or me?""

Work stopped as Schamoni and his subject established their positions. They compromised, with a little help from Hess, who had known both de Saint Phalle and Schamoni for nearly 25 years.

"I don't think she was ever uncooperative," says Hess.

"Her fear was that because of Jean's strength and his worldwide appeal and his masculinity and all the things that make you attracted to him, she felt (that) would detract from her. And rightly so ...

"Niki, who has emphysema caused by inhaling the fumes from the petrochemicals and plastics she used for her work all those years, will never be completely healthy again," he continues. "She's sacrificed a tremendous amount for her art and she wanted to make sure that if someone would do the quintessential film on Niki de Saint Phalle, it would be on her. But it would also be wonderful to show the love she has for humanity. And, as an artist, the relationship she had (with Tinguely) exists maybe once or twice in this century."

"I truly wanted Peter to understand my paradoxes - the way I am," she explains. "When I saw the finished thing," - she pauses here, sighs and laughs ironically -

"I didn't realize how much I'd worked. Workaholics never do. So it was a surprise to me to see the quantity of work. I say to myself: 'Am I crazy, still embarking on huge projects?' I was really staggered."

The art of Niki de Saint Phalle is paradox. Masculine and feminine. Rage and love. Laughter and tears. Deconstructing and reconstructing. In constant movement, transmogrification, real or imagined. Her forms are kinetic, always on the way to somewhere. They are not static and fixed, even if the pieces are huge and immovable. With de Saint Phalle, the viewer starts with the eye, an assault of the obvious, and then the emotions take the brunt.

Where does the paradox come from? A good beginning is her heritage. She is French. She is American. The two sides have battled for her heart and soul since her birth.

She was born Marie Agnes de Saint Phalle in Neuilly-sur-Seine on Oct. 29, 1930 - a "double Scorpio," as she likes to remind people. She was raised in New York by her half-French, half- Southern belle mother,Jeanne Jacqueline de Saint Phalle, nee Harper, and her French banker father, Andre Marie Fal de Saint Phalle, who traces his family's lineage back to the Crusades. Born a year after the eponymous family bank failed, she calls herself a "'Depression baby."

Her upbringing, however, was decidedly posh, patrician and parochial. She went to school at the Convent of the Sacred Heart on 91st Street in New York. By the time she was 17, she was an exotic combination of international debutante and American beauty. She dabbled in modeling and ended up on the cover of Life Magazine on Sept. 29, 1949, a month before her 19th birthday. In her face was hauteur, innocence and mystery - qualities that would stay with her throughout her life. The portrait appeared, coincidentally, right before she and Harry Matthews, the scion of an Eastern WASP family, eloped.

"I married to escape," she says bluntly. "And I was lucky enough to have met a man I could do this with. At the time, it was a way for both Harry and I to break free of our backgrounds - Harry's old WASP family and my own crazy family. We rarely saw either of them."

At first, the pair lived in Cambridge, Mass., where she began painting a la Matisse and Jackson Pollock, and where he studied music at Harvard. They spent most of their time at the movies, sometimes seeing two or three films a day.

Then, "quite unexpectedly," she says, "I became pregnant. My mother-in-law was told and she began insisting that I have an abortion. She insisted so much, I decided not to." Her daughter Laura, whose name was inspired by the Gene Tierney film and by Petrarch's

"Laura," was born in Boston in 1951. Four years later, the couple's second child, Philip, was born in Mallorca.

For a great part of their marriage, the Matthews' were American expatriates - "hippies before there were hippies," de Saint Phalle laughs - bumming around Europe, going where they wished. They made connections with a coterie of international intelligentsia that included poets Kenneth Koch, Frank O'Hara and John Ashbery. They founded a literary magazine, Locus Solus, an homage to French surrealist writer Raymond Roussel. It was a high time, stimulating, liberating. And definitely not what Niki's mother had in mind for her.

"It was the right time for me," says de Saint Phalle.

"The only man I really fell for was Harry. He was my own age. He had a big brain, and even at that time, he was an ardent feminist. To my mother's rage, we both shared the housework and child care."

De Saint Phalle raised her children and began painting. But all was not well. She felt a growing frustration, battling the traditional, male-dominated society of the early '50s. Later on, she wrote: "I did not want to be (a) guardian of the hearth. ... I would not accept the boundaries that my mother tried to impose on my life because I was a woman."

At 29, she left her children with her husband and set out to follow her bliss, to become a legitimate artist, not a Sunday painter whose first responsibility was to other people.

"There was much guilt," she says. "It was the hardest, most painful decision for my life because I loved my family. I needed, though, to follow my dream and make my work my sole priority. I had seen my own mother's frustration. She could barely express herself and 'devoured' her family instead. I did not want to repeat her mistake."

A further impetus was a conversation with Abstract Expressionist Joan Mitchell. "She was another American expatriate like myself," says de Saint Phalle. "One day, she goaded me. She asked: 'Who is your gallery?' When I told her I had none, she said, 'Oh, I see. You're just a housewife occupying herself by painting. An amateur.' She did me a great favor. I was like a bull seeing red. Is this how I looked to the world? I would show them who I was, how serious was my intent."

"I wanted the world and the world belonged to MEN. They had the power and I wanted it. I would steal their fire from them." - Niki de Saint Phalle

To say that Niki de Saint Phalle was one pissed-off female would be ... accurate. But she was also audacious, daring, fearless and playful. A female Prometheus, stealing male fire by out-macho-ing the most macho of the male artists, France's Nouveaux Realistes (New Realists).

Soon after leaving hearth and home - her husband, recognizing the painting on the wall, financed her independence by purchasing her existing art so she could support herself - her work began to change. Instead of making pictures that were derivative of other artists, she began creating collages and assemblages out of found objects, violent found objects - knives, razor blades, broken scissors, vise-grips shaped like pistols. Since she had not been issued a phallus at birth or given automatic entree into the world of men, she would adopt phallic symbols in her work.

When she was 25 and still married to Matthews, de Saint Phalle met Jean Tinguely, one of the New Realists. He was a dashing, dangerous man. Darkly handsome, wiry and six years older than she, living in an open, quite bohemian

"arrangement" with a woman named Eva. Eva had her live-in lover; Jean followed his own dalliances. As an artist, the Swiss-born Tinguely created his "machines that did nothing" - Rube Goldbergesque contrivances built with moving cogs, gears, wheels, drive-shafts, windmills. Parts salvaged from junk yards.

Tinguely and de Saint Phalle began a creative partnership that lasted until 1991, when he died at the age of 65. For the first five years they knew each other and worked together, they were friends and co-artists. Nothing more. It was not until after de Saint Phalle had left Matthews and was preparing to go out for an evening with Tinguely's copain in the Nouveaux Realistes, an artist named Daniel Spoerri, that Tinguely realized he was in love with her.

De Saint Phalle remembers: "I had a nice new coat given to me by my ex-husband. Jean thought it was too nice to wear on a date with Daniel. He was Jean's best friend and Jean couldn't stand it. He realized he really liked me."

For five years, de Saint Phalle and Tinguely maintained both a working relationship and a love affair, punctuated with de Saint Phalle's constant struggle to be taken seriously in the company of men.

She did it with a gun.

The "shooting paintings" put darling Niki on the map. They, too, were assemblages of found items attached to boards along with balloons filled with paint, plastered over and painted dead white. The "canvases" were set up out-of-doors. From 20 yards away, de Saint Phalle or another one of her art cohorts would shoot away with rifles or handguns. The resulting tir, or shooting paintings, were born out of violence, or as de Saint Phalle would write, "I shot against daddy, against all men - my brother, society. Against myself." She would also say: "I have killed the paintings. This is war with no victims. Instead of becoming a real terrorist, I became a terrorist for art."

De Saint Phalle created the shooting paintings in concert with Tinguely, the New Realists (which included Christo and Armam) and their American friends, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Larry Rivers, Frank Stella and Ed Kienholz.

"The New Realists was a big male scene and I invaded it. I shot my way into the group!" she says with a delightful chortle.

"Pierre Restany, who founded the New Realists, attended my first shooting session. He thought I was outrageous and accepted me as a member of his group. But I had problems with (them) about a year after I joined. I had begun to do more figurative work and they disapproved. But I did not pay them much attention. I just moved on. I would always change my direction when I needed to. I was with them for a very short time. It was the only movement I was ever in. Movements are ephemeral anyway."

The shooting paintings, however, were so wantonly excessive in concept and execution that they attracted major media attention. It was that television footage, coupled with some 16mm film shot with a hand-held camera by a very young Francois de Menuil, now an architect and scion of the Houston de Menuil family, that Schamoni used in his documentary.

"The canvases were virginal, white," says Schamoni.

"Then they start to kill the paintings. The paint is like blood. It was very powerful." And, very addicting.

The adrenaline rush of pulling the trigger; of witnessing creation born of destruction, affected Niki. After four years of shooting at dead white assemblages, de Saint Phalle gave it up. In the film, she says, "I was hooked and I did not like to be dependent."

The times in which de Saint Phalle found herself were yeasty and filled with promise. Fifteen years after the end of the Second World War and the art world was beginning to take off, both in America, with the work of Rauschenberg, Rivers, Lichtenstein, Stella and Johns, and in Europe, with the Nouveaux Realistes.

"I remember the excitement of looking at the world and saying that everything is art. Life is art. Everything you see is art," she says.

And perhaps that much hasn't changed about de Saint Phalle, who looks back at the shooting paintings with some humor. "Someone who is doing (something like) my Tarot Garden isn't feeling the same about the world as someone who is shooting. I look at (the tir) as relics. The only ones I like are figurative and give messages. The abstract ones don't mean much to me."

"The Bigest (sic) and Best woman in the world. She is eighty feet long and twenty feet high ... She is a cathedral." - Niki de Saint Phalle's words written on the schematic for her monumental female figure, "Hon."

Shortly after she ended her shooting paintings, de Saint Phalle began working with female imagery - paintings and sculptures of brides, mothers, women giving birth, witches and whores. Then a sort of leitmotif emerged. The Nana. A benevolent female with huge breasts, thighs and buttocks. The Universal Earth Mother, gamboling, dancing, cavorting and celebrating life.

From June 9 to Sept. 4, 1966, de Saint Phalle, assisted and abetted by Tinguely and Per Olof Ulvedt, created the ultimate Nana. She was a monumental female called

"Hon," Swedish for "she," for the Moderna Museet in Stockholm. "Hon" was a recumbent figure, lying on her back, legs akimbo. A habitat with a coffee bar and a small cinema inside. To enter her was a Freudian joke. The door was in actuality a green-framed orifice between her legs, a gigantic vagina. Written on one enormous thigh was the medieval French maxim: Honi sont qui mal y pense. Evil to him who evil thinks.

Evil may have been in the eye of the beholder, but mischief was in the hearts of the creators. "Hon" was art as provocation. The figure was envelopingly female; men turned to midgets beside it. The epigram was a warning against criticism and shock. "We were expecting it," says de Saint Phalle. "I would joke with (the museum director) Pontus Hulten, 'You're going to lose your job.' Jean Tinguely thought it was so close to the truth. We had to keep it secret. Sweden was the natural place for it. I don't think, given the time in history, we could have done it anywhere else. France? Impossible!"

Hulten, who became a lifelong friend and supporter of both de Saint Phalle and Tinguely, and who is today director of the Mario Botta-designed Tinguely museum, under construction in Basel, Switzerland, comments: "The most mysterious thing was that we managed to build it in 5 1/2 weeks with very few people. Tinguely, of course, was an extraordinary motivator. He accepted not to do something on his own and managed the whole project."

De Saint Phalle and Tinguely forged an impressive partnership in the next decade, creating monumental projects for which he worked as the engineer, sublimating his art to hers, including the "Le Paradis Fantastique," a roof garden of nine de Saint Phalle statues and six Tinguely machines created for the French Pavilion at Expo '67 in Montreal.

"If they had done something that was entirely similar, they could not have stayed together," says Hulten. "The fact that they did totally different things made it more clear who was who."

Tinguely was a strong presence in de Saint Phalle's life. Their relationship was yet another of de Saint Phalle's paradoxes. He existed independently of her and she of him, yet he was enough of his own person to be supportive of her art, both literally and symbolically.

"We had a marvelous relationship," she says. "We were in complicity, in the French sense of the word. Like there is a secret between the two of you - that you are tuned in to the same things. A psychic collaboration of opposites. That is what I like when I work, opposition. It was not without its ups and downs, but we were not together as lovers after the first five years. We gave each other some air, which made it possible to exist on both sides."

Meanwhile, "Hon," says de Saint Phalle, only ignited her interest in creating art habitats. She and Tinguely were to build mammoth figures that were living spaces or children's playgrounds. In Jerusalem, for instance, she made a monster called the Golem after Yiddish folklore. It is a scary-looking black and white amoeba-monster with long red tongues - in actuality, three sliding boards - set in playground sand. In Belgium, she made a monster-dragon into a playhouse. But all was prelude to her masterwork, the fantasy Tarot Garden in Tuscany.

"I knew this was what I was meant to do. It wasn't even my choice. It was my destiny." - Niki de Saint Phalle, speaking of the Tarot Garden

In the Tarot deck, there are 22 figurative cards of the Major Arcana, the Royal suit. De Saint Phalle's symbolic mentor is the Fool. The Fool is dressed in rags, carrying everything he owns in a pack on his shoulder. A small dog nips at his heels; he is blind, yet he is audaciously striding toward the precipice, a smile on his face. He knows he can step off into the void and not perish.

When de Saint Phalle stepped off into the unknown in 1979, she was almost 50. She never anticipated that the Tarot Garden would take more than 15 years to complete or that she would actually have to live in Italy during its construction. "I went in like a blind person, like someone who jumps in the river," she says. "It wasn't supposed to be this big. I didn't plan to live there. I got totally swamped by the project. ... No, not swamped. Immersed. I could not leave it."

Her home at Garavicchio was another one of her colossal women, the Sphinx. Another of her playful/practical habitats. Her bedroom was in one massive round breast; the kitchen in the other. The project office, in the body.

The garden itself is very Gaudiesque. When Niki and Harry Matthews were on their youthful hegira, she became transfixed with Gaudi's fanciful architecture and garden in Barcelona. "It was like St. Paul seeing the light," she remembers. "I saw the light. I knew that one day I would make a garden to make people happy, filled with light and joy."

The immense figures in the Garden were created on mesh frames. Tinguely oversaw the construction. Cement was poured and the figures took on a ghostly gray demeanor. Then came ceramics, mirrors, painted color. The Sphinx was joined by the Empress, the Magician, the Tower topped by one of Tinguely's twittering machines, the Tree of Life, the Lovers, the Firebird. Every decorative art de Saint Phalle ever used or saw was incorporated into the garden, which was built in an abandoned stone quarry given to her by the two brothers of Marella Agnelli, wife of Fiat magnate Gianni Agnelli.

Recently, a foundation to oversee the care and maintenance of the Tarot Garden has been created through the good offices of a friend of de Saint Phalle and Tinguely, the Swiss Paul Zacher, owner of Hoffman-LaRoche, the world's largest pharmaceutical company. Originally, however, de Saint Phalle financed the garden herself. One-third of the proceeds came from the sale of her signature perfume created for Jacqueline Cochran cosmetics, with its collectors bottle topped with twined serpents - one chrome, the other colorful lacquer.

Swiss-born Italian architect Botta, creator of the S.F. Museum of Modern Art, has designed the entrance gate for the garden. It is not his only project with de Saint Phalle. Together, the two will create a Noah's Ark in Jerusalem.

"San Diego was my last card. If this did not work, I would join the Hemlock Society." - Niki de Saint Phalle in her introduction to "Tableaux eclates."

For years, Niki de Saint Phalle had breathed in the toxic fumes from the plastic materials she used to coat her figures. They took their toll. She could not breathe. Her condition was grave. So was the health of Jean Tinguely. By the end of the '80s, much of her life started to fall apart at once.

Tinguely died in 1991. Grief-stricken and ill, de Saint Phalle went back to New York, where, in her sorrow, she came upon an art form that would not only remember and honor Tinguely, but could help her leave him behind and go forward. Called the "Tableaux eclates," they are exploding pictures with tiny hidden motors (an homage to Tinguely's mechanics) that move the elements of the paintings apart and then together again.

"Being in the city, my city," de Saint Phalle wrote, "I started to think about the life around me. The vibrant city life, visually exploding, rushing, energies Bursting (sic). Other thoughts took hold of me. How the world was fragmenting into racism, religious-isms and hates. Out of this dark journey came light. I had a vision of a painting Exploding (sic), then coming together. Rejoined. I had to do it."

From Paris, she adds: "It was a way of keeping Jean around me by going into movement, even through we hadn't been living together for a long time. We remained very close."

De Saint Phalle, was, in her own words, "dangerously sick." She "nomaded" around, dragging an oxygen tank, searching for clear air and good weather - "a climate where I could breathe and move without pain." She consulted with a physician in New York, telling him:

"Life is not worth living. ... To breathe or not to breathe had become the question." She was advised to go to San Diego.

"It was my last card," she says. Suicide was present in her mind. In San Diego, she writes: "I was rejuvenated by the open spaces, the desert, the ocean, leaving my past life, starting over."

Part of that spiritual and physical rejuvenation is a new project with Mario Botta. A Noah's Ark for Jerusalem, a project that will reunite her with Teddy Kolleck, the aged former mayor who helped her and Tinguely when they built the Golem.

"Yes, Noah's Ark has been approved, but we still need to raise money," she says. "The Ark has had a strange life. I wanted to make it for some 20 years since completing the Golem. First there were no funds, and then, when monies were available, I was in the midst of the Tarot Garden. In the last few years, Teddy Kolleck has invited me several times to come to Jerusalem. Each time, my asthma prevented me from going."

One day, she continues, she realized she would no longer be able to take on "the burden of working on site because of my health. I could, nevertheless, make all of the animals. And then a vision came into my head of Mario Botta doing the Ark in Jerusalem Stone."

The two had collaborated on a project called The Temple of All Religions for Nmes. She thought of him for the Ark

"because of the contrast in our work, which makes for an exciting collaboration." "For me," she stresses,

"collaboration exists through opposition.

"Mario and I do share a couple of hidden links in our separate visions. We are both enthusiasts and make reference in our work to many different architectural and sculptural forms. We both have a love of beautiful, textural materials. ... Working with him is exciting, stimulating and inspiring. He is forever unsatisfied with what he is doing, which makes him constantly creative and critical in his approach to his work as well as to mine. I am the same. It makes for a very lively partnership."

So, life goes on. Without Jean Tinguely. With a burgeoning family. She is a new grandmother by her son Philip; and a great grandmother with a 2-year-old boy, the son of her daughter Laura's daughter.

At 64, she has come to terms with her life. It has been only recently that she says she's experienced a kind of healing - both of her lungs and of the memory of her father that haunted her from childhood and figures heavily in her work. Silent for more than 50 years, she wrote a memoir in French called "The Secret," which told of her father's sexual abuse. While she spent a lifetime attempting, through her art, to beset, belittle and conquer men, she never expiated Daddy, not even in a highly symbolic and Freudian early film called "Daddy," in which the father figure is humiliated. Her slim volume has been translated into English. She is thinking of having it published.

"You can imagine that my family has not been too thrilled with me," she says with a husky laugh. "First, with the shooting paintings and now with my new revelations. It isn't that I've improved with age. ... I'm not getting any better."

And, of her push me / pull you relationship with Tinguely, was she ever able to discover: Who is the monster. She or Jean?

She laughs and says softly, "Both."

Niki de Saint Phalle: Who is the Monster - You or Me? a film by Peter Schamoni, Mill Valley Film Festival, 7 p.m., Oct. 7, Sequoia Theater, Mill Valley; reception directly after the film at the Ferrari dealership; for information, call the Festival office at (415) 383-5346.&lt;